The unbanning of the ANC, the return of its leaders from exile and the dawn of democracy marked a reversal of migration patterns. Until then apartheid South Africa experienced tens of thousands of its people going into exile, but post-1994 saw the country becoming home to exiled organisations fighting for autonomy, freedom, democracy and separate states.
The Ogoni Solidarity Forum (OSF) condemns the pollution by oil companies of its ancestral homeland in southern Nigeria. It demands a chunk of Nigeria’s oil wealth. Unlike the OSF, the Biafra National Congress (BNC) is fighting for a separate state called Biafra to be established in southeast Nigeria.
The BNC’s deputy national coordinator, Coleman Emejuru, says the BNC is an offshoot of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (Massob).
“We have held several non-violent demonstrations at the UN office and at the Nigerian high commission. We have asked the Nigerian government to release the thousands of activists who are in detention now,” he says.
Emejuru says the only language the Nigerian government understands is violence, and it has been lenient with Niger Delta and other militants who have called for the balkanisation of Nigeria using violence. He cites as an example Alhaji Asari Dokubo, a militant in the Niger Delta who was arrested for advocating sabotage of oil installations but who was later released. “Biafrans are decided on actualisation. If it means violence we shall go for it,” he says.
Ralph Uwazuruike, the leader of Massob, was released from detention at the end of October. He has declared that he will continue his struggle for independence. “Nigeria must be balkanised,” he is reported to have said. “Nigeria is going to break into six republics. All the geopolitical zones of the country will soon become separate countries.”
Osita Ezeliora, a member of Massob, says that when the war started in 1967 he was two years old. “I was quite young, but I was precocious. I remember asking my mother, ‘Why are white people trying to kill us?'” He was referring to the light-skinned Egyptian pilots, hired by the federal government to fly the fighter aircraft that pounded the breakaway state with bombs.
“The Nigerian government is a genocidal one,” Ezeliora says. “One of the war leaders there, a Brigadier-General Benjamin Adekunle, reportedly told his soldiers to ‘shoot every moving object in sight and, when you are done, shoot all immobile objects’. Why has he not been indicted by the International Criminal Court? He is a millionaire for committing genocide. About 3,2-million Igbos died in that war.” Other estimates put the figure at a million.
“Biafra is a country in the mind. You cannot kill it and ideas have consequences,” says Ezeliora, a recent PhD graduate in literature. He says after the war many Igbos lost their savings and properties. “My father’s property was seized in Calabar. We had to struggle to survive. Many others left Nigeria. How many Hausas and Fulanis do you see here? None. They all work in government and in the army. I had to come here and do a PhD to get a job.” Traditionally the Hausa- and Fulani-populated northern part of Nigeria has provided the bulk of successive military junta leaders.
The OSF was in Cape Town this week to commemorate the 12th anniversary of the death of writer Ken Saro Wiwa and eight other activists who were executed by the Sani Abacha government on what many analysts believe were trumped-up charges. The nine were vocal in their condemnation of environmental degradation by Shell and other oil companies.
“We decided to locate our organisation here because we believe South Africa has better democratic structures than any other country on the continent,” says Barry Wugale, OSF’s spokesperson. “We believe Africans shouldn’t run away and struggle from overseas.”
Wugale says lobbying local parliamentarians to raise awareness has had a lukewarm response. “What is happening in Nigeria is no different to what happened in South Africa. The only difference is that we have an indigenous apartheid — black on black,” Wugale says.
The Nigerian High Commission could not be reached at the time of going to press.
South African poet and activist Dennis Brutus says his association with Saro Wiwa goes back to 1988/89 when they met at a conference on African literature in the United States. “We believe Shell was complicit in his arrest and death.”
Brutus bemoans the role of oil corporations in the pollution of Nigeria, South Africa and elsewhere in the world. “Many infants are suffering from respiratory diseases because of the pollution from the oil industry.”